Wordpress theme has been chosen and customized
My eyes hurt from staring at the screen for days…but the switch to a new WordPress blog theme is finally complete! 
I think I downloaded about 20-30 different themes between 2 column and 3 column ones. Some were Google Adsense friendly which is basically what this ProSense Theme is. It was a difficult few days picking through the ones I had downloaded and tested.
I even made a spreadsheet of all the different features each of the themes had. I may be just a bit anal retentive about what I wanted and how I wanted the blogs to look like…but in the end, I was trying to find a blog theme that is not only workable with this blog but will also be versatile enough to begin my blog empire. Yes, you heard it here…I’m starting an EMPIRE! 
So some of my requirements for a blog theme was that it had to have:
I’m no super savvy php and css designer, if I was I would have created my own wordpress theme to avoid the headaches of getting to know the ins and outs of another person’s creation! I picked out about 5 or 6 themes that to me had good bones to work with, or so it seemed that way. You just never know what you’re up against until you get in there and start tweaking things around to adjust to your own tastes.
I’ve lost hours of time customizing a theme that ended up being too much of a headache to make work….simply because of the way the layout was coded and the structure of the css stylesheet. I had worked on this Studio Press theme which on its own without customizing looked great! But there was just something with the way it was laid out and written that had me scratching my head on more than one occasion. I think I spent an entire night trying to find a work around for what I wanted to do in compensation for how they designed their theme. It was literally driving me bonkers! 
It amazes me just how different each person does coding…especially to achieve the same end result. But I suppose that is true with virtually anything anyone ever do, the creative process is unique to each person.
So after about two days sitting on the Studio Press theme, I just gave up. This was after I figured out how to get rid of the ugly gray border it put around all my images and smilies. Why on earth they put two img style attribute in two totally different locations within their stylesheet is beyond me. I had to basically go through the entire 600+ lines of css with a fine tooth comb to find a way to fix it. The funny thing is that I went to the developer’s website and saw someone posting a message two days prior asking the same question about getting rid of the border around his images! No one answered but since I have figured it out, I replied to him but my post is still in queue.
In the end, I gave up on that and began tweaking a couple of other wordpress themes and ended up with this one. I think I’ve spent about two days with it too because it was pretty plain but extremely function and fast loading, plus it was super adsense friendly! The coding is very good and being that my method of tweaking involves a lot of trial and error which is basically me changing a value of a css style and refreshing the page to see if something moves the way I want. “Undo” is my best friend. 
There were elements from other blog themes that really captured my attention because they were little details that made it look more personal. I tried adopting some of those principles in this blog and therefore, it required a lot of css comparing, another time consuming factor.
I’ve pretty much gotten my blog to look the way I want. Everything that is graphical on it is designed by me therefore, I can recreate the same rss icon to match a new background image etc. The only thing that isn’t designed by me are those Silk Icons by FamFamFam. They are free for use so I thought I would give them a link here. Those icons would be the ones for the posting info: calendar icon, file icon, girl user icon, comment icon. There were a ton of them I could have used but I like doing my own graphics too. I was checking out rss icons on the web, it’s amazing how people make them look like glass!
Anyway, I am finally done! I absolutely love this theme…I did have to do some minor tweaking with their layout and customized it to my own tastes but overall, I would recommend this theme to anyone who is looking to switch, especially if you’re upgrading to the new version of wordpress! It’s got all the requirements I listed above except that it didn’t have page tabs. I’m ok with that and one day if I feel ambitious enough, I may try to figure out how to put them in.
It’s been a serious learning experience for me and I’m not sure if I’ll even retain it for future use. I did so many edits that I can’t say for sure what element I tweaked and what is the original format. I feel like my brain is full on this topic for now….must sleep now zzzzzzz….
